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Adam Lindemann admits to being a chronic shopper. In a collecting spree lasting some 15 years so far, the financier and media entrepreneur has focused on half a dozen artistic categories, including African and Oceanic artifacts; watches; contemporary paintings and sculpture by the likes of Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons; and post-1920s furniture. In each of these areas, he has bought scores of objects.

When not overseeing his businesses from a sunny office in the Seagram building in midtown Manhattan, he travels the world interviewing connoisseurs and editing the transcripts of their conversations into advice books for collectors. The more the experts disagree over what constitutes a superior artwork and how markets function, the happier Lindemann is.

"Every book I write is part of my education. I want readers to discover the fields with me," he says. For Collecting Contemporary (Taschen, 2006), he gathered insights from heavyweights Larry Gagosian, Eli Broad and Glenn Lowry, among others. His forthcoming book, Collecting Design, will feature gallerists, including Bruno Bischofberger, Anthony DeLorenzo, Suzanne Demisch, Barry Friedman and Axel Vervoordt, riffing alongside such patrons and tastemakers as Peter Brant, Peter Marino, Robert Rubin and Ian Schrager on issues like whether Maria Pergay is overrated and if design is still a bargain.

"I’m a good person to do this book because I came from a place of relative ignorance," Lindemann says. "I’m shocked at how little I used to know, the kinds of pieces I would just walk past in museums or galleries or private collections and not understand." About six years ago, he started collecting contemporary furniture to furnish a Catskills house, which has Urs Fischer and Franz West sculptures on the lawn. He hired the painter Richard Woods to simulate Tudor beams across the building’s façade and outfitted the interior with circa 1970 faceted-metal pieces by Paul Evans. "I’d come across them just by accident at ABC Home," Lindemann says. "A lot of people didn’t like Evans’s work then, which only made me like it more — I can be a contrarian. Even my wife [contemporary-art dealer Amalia Dayan] didn’t like it much. But she’s come around."

Lindemann’s friends, including dealers, kept suggesting other designers, making the narrative of his collection’s growth resemble a series of boldface names: "Azzedine Alaïa told me to buy Shiro Kuramata...I have one of these Max Lamb bronze chairs; Brad Pitt has six others from the edition." In 2005, he even acquired a design company, Ikepod, which was founded by Marc Newson in 1994 and went bankrupt in 2003. Its limited-edition watches, whose prices run into tens of thousands of dollars, feature buckle-free bands of rubber and are either packed with data dials or lacily honeycombed. Learning how such timepieces are laid out and crafted, Lindemann says, "increased my respect for what designers do."

Lindemann’s furniture collection now contains "almost all the greats one needs to have," he says, pulling out a six-inch-thick loose-leaf binder of images of his holdings. He bought the pieces at auction houses, including Artcurial, Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Sollo Rago, and at galleries such as Demisch Danant and Moss, in New York, and Paris’s Galerie Kreo, for prices starting in the low thousands. They span chronologically from a 1927 red-lacquer dining set by mile-Jacques Ruhlmann to a 2008 set of rickety-looking benches and a table that the Viennese Conceptual artists Gelitin cobbled out of scrapwood.

Lindemann displays pieces from his collection in his office and at a Montauk house that David Adjaye renovated for the couple and their four daughters, ages 1 to 17 (the three eldest are from his first marriage). Adjaye is also gutting an 1898 carriage house on the Upper East Side, creating a three-building family compound behind the original limestone-and-brick façade. In the high-ceilinged rooms, Lindemann says, "the main objective is to exhibit paintings and sculpture and design."

The furniture, unlike the art by Basquiat, Warhol and others, is meant to be touched. "The kids can hang out on almost anything," he says. Among the few off-limit objects is Newson’s Micarta chair, which looks like a curl of exotic wood but is actually formed out of a linen-and-resin composite. "Only I can sit on that one, and I remove my trousers before doing so — you must print that, definitely," says the owner, blue eyes twinkling. "Seriously, I’m lucky enough to have these pieces . . . and to enjoy them, and a major appeal of design is that it’s accessible; you can really interact with it. "

Lindemann rarely unloads anything. "I’m not coming at this from a speculative viewpoint," he says. "I did sell one Paul Evans commode, . . . and I made a tidy profit, but it hurt to let it go." For those with a less sentimental slant on collecting, however, the field is "a really good investment: It won’t jump like contemporary art has jumped, but there are good buys now, provided you know the pitfalls to avoid," he says, adding that in his book, the interviewees will help explain "the different cans of worms for different kinds of furniture. With Deco you have to look very carefully at condition, authenticity and provenance. You need to come at it like you’re buying a vintage car: Who drove it, who owned it, how much restoration and tampering has been done, does it have the right doors and engine and transmission? And then with some midcentury pieces, patina and original finishes — that’s an especially tricky area. Sure, original oil finish is rare and can be pricey on Nakashima pieces. But how much does it matter? The designer himself just told people to rub the wood with linseed oil again and again."

As for contemporary design, Lindemann continues, "you usually know how many examples were made and what condition to look for, but how do you decide whether the idea is really original and good, or whether the designer was just jumping on a bandwagon with nothing particular to say?" When asked whom he thought was overrated, his eyes burn silently for a moment.

"What should I say? Not everything has to be an investment. You can play the design market, but it’s a better place to be an end user." His interviewees, he says, "bluntly talk about who they think is overrated. Readers can make up their own minds. Time will tell who’s right."

All he’ll predict with certainty is that the global market for pre-1900 antiques is past its prime. "Prouvé, Nakashima, Royère, Newson — that’s the stuff of our time. Our generation will still be sitting on it and buying it when we’re 70 years old," he states, adding that he himself is still in the hunt: "My collection is broad and encyclopedic, but I have a long way to go. Right now I’d buy the right Pierre Chareau, the right piece of Jean Dunand lacquer, the right Carlo Mollino. I’ve satisfied a lot of my urges. But every couple of weeks, a new one comes up." Such is the lot of a chronic shopper.

"Go Ask Adam" originally appeared in the April 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's April 2009 Table of Contents.